Where do I find maps that I can embed on my pages without worrying about copyright?
Google Maps allows embedding, and OpenStreetMap exists for that purpose, but neither
of them do atlas-style maps. So I went looking and found this page, which
looked like it could do exactly what I'm looking for:

Off to Ballarat again to visit Dr. Paul
Smith, our GP, who didn't
have too much to add to what has already happened. We have a pretty full schedule with
medical treatment for Yvonne in the near future.

Back home, I just had time to pack Leonid and
Nikolai into the car, and then off
to Cape Clear to visit Pene Kirk, the
vet: Leo had something wrong with his left hind paw. Yvonne suspected that it was a grass
seed that had got stuck in the paw and infected.

Pene took one look and diagnosed a fused joint in the paw, apparently a common ailment
with greyhounds. Got a lecture for not
having clipped his claws. “He's a dog, not a bird of prey. He doesn't need talons like
that”. Solution: amputation.

That proved not to be as invasive as it sounds. She removed the claw and half the bone
joining it to the joint:

She also did Niko's, to his usual displeasure. Back home with a decidedly groggy Leo, who
gradually came to over the next hour or two. And Yvonne tells me that she had cut their
claws only yesterday. But the more I think about it, the more I think that this must have
been going on for quite some time. Leo had a history of biting his foot. We thought it was
just a behaviourism, but possibly it was his way of alleviating the pain (or itching?). Two
things are for sure: we'll keep a better eye on their behaviour, and on the length of their
claws.

Or is it? It claims to be a Butcher Trolley, whatever that is. You'd expect it to be
related to meat, but (apart from the dog at bottom right of the image) there's not much meat
to be seen or implied.

Still, it looks like something that we could use, so I picked one up on Wednesday, and today
I started to assemble it. How about that, according to the package, it's Industrial
quality. Now that suggests to me that it's made out of metal and slightly greasy, but I get
the impression that the intention is to say that it's more than Professional. I
wonder if we'll see more nonsense of this kind.

The truth is somewhat different. On unpacking, the uneven surface was immediately apparent.
Yes, it's pine, and there are knot holes, though these are particularly roughly finished:

Olympus has released firmware
upgrades for several products that I have: the OM-D E-M1 Mark I, the
OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO. The pre-release discussion suggests a way
to download the firmware and install it from
an SD card, just what I have been
looking at for a long time. The information was posted on Facebook, so I can no longer find it, but it seems to be
related to this page. It
let me download the code (88 MB!), but it's structured so that I can't find out how to do
the transfer to the SD card. Instead I need to follow the procedure that the author of the
page decided on, without knowing up front what it is.

This may be worth it, but right now I didn't have the time, so I used the painful way via Digital Camera Updater, in the process discovering that it wouldn't update both
camera and lens at the same time, though both needed updating, and that, without warning, it
didn't save the configuration for my E-M1 Mark I (which I now need to reset manually).

What's missing here? What's “the angle (1 to 3)”? And what does it do? What's
“distortion”?

Did a bit of experimentation. “Distortion” is the term they use to mean “divergence
from rectilinear
projection”. The feature takes a (presumably undistorted) fisheye projection and
converts it to an (implicitly undistorted) rectilinear projection.

What, in the raw image? No, of course not. It doesn't say, but this is Yet Another camera
function that overrides your choice of image format and
creates JPEG images even if you didn't
explicitly ask for them. The raw image is unaffected by any of these settings. That makes
sense, but can't the “instructions” say so?

And “angle”? It's a crop specification. Crop 3 (smallest image, longest equivalent focal
length) corresponds to a rectilinear lens with a focal length of marginally less than 9 mm.
Crop 1 could correspond to a rectilinear lens with a focal length of 7 mm. Here's what I
found with a series of images taken from the same place:

So “angle” 3 is marginally wider than the 9 mm image. And “angle” 1 is considerably
narrower than what DxO makes out of the same view. Arguably that makes sense, since the DxO
view shows the real limits of rectilinear projection.

But what use is this? It all crops, it all only produces JPEG output. I don't see myself
using it.

On Thursday we received a
number of prescriptions for medication. Nothing was needed immediately, and rather than
wait while they were being filled out, we decided to leave them until today, when Chris
Bahlo and Yvonne were planning to go
to Pilates: they could hand in the
prescription and collect it on the way back.

Problem: Chris has a cold, and so they cancelled Pilates. And we needed the prescriptions.
So I had to drive into town and pick them up, also returning the horrible “butcher trolley”. On the way home,
dropped in at Christie's in La
Trobe St, No, they didn't have anything like that. They could get one made, but they didn't
know anybody who would have them off the shelf. An antique shop, maybe?

But that was just the purchase price, not the postage. OK, message to seller, who again
replied quickly: He had refunded the postage too. Checked my PayPal account: yes, all OK, though it was two separate
refunds. PayPal or eBay up to their usual
tricks. Case closed.

And then today, a week later, I received not one, but three more messages:

This email confirms that the Pending Refund you received for $11.00 USD from seller@ebay.com has cleared. The funds are now reflected in your PayPal balance.

That was the postage, and the third message referred to the item itself. What does this
mean? It seems that it's one of their irritating delayed payments, this time nearly a week.
Do they suspect the seller? Or me? And why was I able to see the transactions in my PayPal
account? I'll never understand these people.

The message from eBay was just about the item, not the postage. No further mail from them.

Taking the photos of the flowers brought a surprise: they were stored in “LN” format, which
in Olympus speak means
“full sized JPEG, average quality”, round 3
MB in size. This was with the OM-D E-M1, where all the
settings got reset. Spent something like 30 minutes putting them in again, with the
exception of one that I forgot to write down and can't find: instead of the “Super Control
Panel”, display a single menu item at once.

Is it worth upgrading the firmware? The purpose of this particular upgrade was:

My experience with
Aurora HDR was mixed: it
was much better than HDR Express, but still
left a number of questions unanswered. Before looking in more detail, it seemed worthwhile
to look at the alternatives, notably the top of the list that I had
found.

In passing, it's interesting to note that I received no reply from Macphun about my
findings. I would have
expected some kind of reply, though clearly they would not have agreed with me.

That's Photomatix PRO, and to my
surprise I discovered that I had had contact with it before, nearly 9 years ago. At the time, it seems, it
was only available for Apple, and it didn't work on my
(PowerPC) Apple, though it didn't make it
clear whether the lack of function was due to the hardware. It's also not clear whether I
understood at the time that it was HDR software.

This time things worked well. The thing installed, and I was able to convert images without
looking at the manual and store them where I wanted them. And the results looked usable.
Here the one image that I have been using for comparison, using the “Normal” preset. Here
the results with HDR Express, Aurora HDR, enfuse and Photomatix. Run the cursor over an image to
compare it with its neighbour:

How about that, the gradation is just about the same as with enfuse. There are
plenty of other presets, including ones that are much gaudier than the Aurora example, but
it's good to know that I can get “normal” images too.

Clearly Photomatix is much better, but it's not perfect. There are knobs to tweak that
could help. The biggest issue, one of the few that I had observed before, is that I can't
find a way to enlarge the image on the screen to the point where I can see the difference
(like in the crops above).

And batch processing? (Almost) “just works”. You can tell it how many images there are per
shot, and by default it stores the results in a subdirectory with a name derived from all
components, and with the inevitable loss of expertise:

I'll do a bit more testing, but it looks like this is the one to take. But which version?
It seems that there's an “Elements” version that costs $40, and a full version that costs
$100, along with one optimized for Real Estate people. What's the difference? Various things that I may or may not need, but then... only Pro
offers batch processing! That's basic! What kind of a world are they selling to?

I needed to do a bank transfer this morning, from the Bank of Melbourne this morning, using their
“Internet Banking” service. But
this time logon failed in a number of different ways. To log in you need three parameters: an
access number, a “Security number”, effectively a PIN between 4 and 6 characters long, and
an “Internet Password”, where the word “Internet” is doubly superfluous.

But when I tried to log in, I got a transient error messages against the “Security number”:
“Please match the requested format”. The value is numeric, of course, and this looks like
the page's way of saying “You entered a non-numeric character”. And it wasn't repeatable,
at least not completely: sometimes it went off to talk to a server with a name that looked
like an IP address with 0 replaced by o. It didn't return.

After about 20 minutes of alternative attempts, including the discovery that on Microsoft
the browser hung and had to be force stopped, finally called the help line on 13 22 66.
Connected to Bill (I think), who listened to my problem report (“Please match the requested
format”) and went through all sorts of identification procedures: “Can you give me your full
name, please?”. Me: “Greg Lehey, 29 Stones Road, Dereel”. Driver license number, please?
Dug that out, then “Your address, please”. “I already gave it to you”. “Huh?”.

He carried on with all sorts of things. Account number? That's not anywhere in my
documentation. More digging. “Can you give me details of transactions in the last two
weeks?”. No, of course I couldn't. It seems that he had forgotten why I was calling.

Finally I got through the business—20 minutes on the phone, a total of over an hour trying
to access the system—and he told me he would have to put me through to “Internet” help. By
this time I was running out of time. I explained again that the problem was clearly at
their end, and would they please call me back when they had fixed it. No, they can't do
that, they're not allowed to make phone calls.

Grr. “Please connect me to your supervisor” (he had confirmed consulting with him
earlier). Long wait, then I was connected with Josh, who had absolutely no details
of the issue. And he wasn't a supervisor: he was 2nd level “Internet” support. He listened
to my problem, and then asked me if I was using
an iPhone or an “Android”. No. Huh?
iPhone or Android? Finally I had to spell it out to him that I was using a computer.

Interesting suggestion then: I should try logging in to St George, ostensibly
another bank. But the login screen had the same structure, and when I tried to log in
there, I got the same error message. Still more proof that it was their problem.

OK, tried with firefox and Chrome. How about “Internet
Explorer”? Dammit, I might as well humour him. Tried it and... it worked! Finally he
became more informative and said that they had ongoing “issues” with firefox, and
that I should use something else. I said that I would give them a week to fix the bug, and
if it wasn't gone by then, I would indeed use something else—another bank.

Was this really a firefox issue? Back to try logging in with firefox. It
worked. So whatever the problem was, it had been fixed or worked around in the meantime.
No thanks to the people whom I contacted. And 1½ hours of time wasted.

We've had web banking for 20 years. When are they going to get it right? And when will
Bank of Melbourne fix their help lines?

On the freeway between Geelong and
Melbourne saw a strange sight: a police car with flashing blue and red lights, clearly
wanting to get past. OK, prepared to pull over at the first opportunity, but he swerved
through the traffic and got past the truck in front of me. Then he disappeared on a slip
road, only to come up the other side, doing at least 125 km/h. Several others came by and
did similar antics. They finally stopped a car on the side of the road, while others drove
on.

What's wrong with this picture? It looked like something out of a bad TV police series.
They didn't seem to have any idea of how to drive, and they took ridiculous risks
(why didn't they just drive along the emergency stop lane?). The cars appear to have
amazing acceleration, but they drove so slowly. I wonder to what extent it was all
necessary, and to what extent they were just doing it for fun. If it's the latter, they
should get more training. They'd be lost on a German freeway.

First to the Victoria Market to do some
shopping, in the process discovering that Minh Phat, the Vietnamese grocery, closed
down on 29 January. It seems (from the link) that the redevelopers of the market
didn't find that they suited the new look, so they're gone. That's a pity. I wasn't as
fond of the place as the person who wrote the entry, but it was convenient. The articles
don't seem to have mentioned the fact that they have another shop in Abbotsford. I've
been there before, and it wasn't far
from the hospital, but I didn't have the address with me.

Yvonne did her usual shopping, while I spent the time taking
photos. Also bought a couple of cookbooks at the cookbook shop near where Minh Phat used to
be. I had expected them not to last, but they've been there at least since our last visit
16 months ago.

The good news about the VM is that car parking is now free for the first hour on some days,
including today. We got through within our time, and then set off for the Epworth Hospital in Richmond. We had left
ourselves an hour just in case, which wasn't unreasonable: it seems that 9 years ago it took me 45 minutes to get to Minh
Phat in Abbotsford, which is nearby. But we made it in 20 minutes, and decided to check in
early rather than kick our heels. That proved to be a good choice: they have a first come,
first served policy, and even so it was nearly 3 hours before Yvonne even got to be
examined.

In the meantime I headed off
to Boronia to Fleischer, the German butcher,
stopping on the way at 135 Brougham St, Kew. That's where my grandparents lived in the
1960s, and which Louis Nowra
mentioned in his book “The Twelfth of
Never”. I spent several weeks there in July 1961, and have only been back once to
drive past. Today at least I got some photos:

And yes, the space before the full stop is original. This positioning of the sign is
complete nonsense. It doesn't mean no entry at all, and it's in the wrong place. What it
really means is that at certain times (7:00 to 9:00) you're not allowed to leave the
roundabout (visible in the distance) in the direction of Wills St, whichever one that may
be. But you only see that after stopping and wondering why you can't continue.

Similar fun in Boronia. There's a parking place behind Fleischers. And now they have a
sign in front of it:

What does that mean? Clearly there's an entrance (left) and exit (right). But it's not
clear to which side the sign applies, nor indeed if it applies at all: it's pointing up the
wrong side of the road.

I can't make up my mind whether this is saying that no entry is allowed at all (clearly
nonsensical), no entry is allowed on the right side (no sign necessary). Basically, the
sign is misplaced and meaningless. And the sign underneath? After careful consideration,
it might mean that traffic from the other side of the road is not allowed to enter
the parking place. That might even make sense, since there's a crest just behind it, and it
could be dangerous. But then the sign is in completely the wrong place.

At Fleischer's, I'm left wondering whether they're going downhill: normally the place is
full, but I was the only customer the whole time, and the place seems a bit run-down: the
door no longer opens properly, scraping into the floor, which it has clearly done for a long
time. I spoke in German the whole time, which the people understood, but it was clear that
they're not in practice. The younger girl said „Du“ to me, apparently not understanding
that it wasn't appropriate. I bought
some Bratwurst, of which they had
various kinds, including “Mild” and “Pure Pork”. It seems that they put beef in all but the
“pure pork”, which is completely at odds with German custom. So I asked „Zwei Kilo von den
Reinen, bitte“, and she started to give me some of the “mild” sausages. I pointed out that
“Pure Pork” translates (literally) as „Rein Schwein“, which they both found amusing.

From there on (figuratively) down memory lane
to Mount Evelyn, where I spent some
time in August 1957. Finding my way wasn't helped by my GPS navigator. Why
doesn't the thing show the compass direction? It told me to drive 90 m and then do a U
turn. Based on what I know of it, I assumed that it thought that I was continuing north, so
I turned south. But by the time it recovered, I had crossed Boronia Road, and it took me on
a long diversion (about 7 km) to get back again.

This map makes it clear that I should, indeed, have left Fleischer's in the other direction.
But there was no way to show me where I was, even in which direction I was pointing (though
I guessed that), nor the direction I needed to go in. Once I did, it was crawling traffic
through suburbia almost all the way to Mount Evelyn: 40 minutes for 24 km, an average
of 36 km/h. 60 years ago this was all countryside.

Finally got to Mount Evelyn. Again, I haven't been there except for driving through since
then, and today I had difficulty finding anything. About the only thing I could recognize
was the course of the roads, and what (I think) was then the village centre is now a little
off to one side.

I couldn't recognize any building, though this must have been built on the ruins of
the grocer's shop that my aunt Frieda and uncle Bill ran in the late 1950s, and which burnt
down some time after they moved on:

I had thought that it was a second replacement for the house that I had lived in, but it
seems that it's still the same house we saw 15 years ago,
but for some reason most of the plant life is gone. Here's what it looked like 15 years
ago:

One recollection I have from my childhood is of wandering down all the way to the (eastern)
end of the road with my father's pickaxe, opening manholes. I didn't shut them again—at 3
years of age I wasn't strong enough for that—and I don't know how many I opened, but I do
recall one on the other side of the T junction, where I found nothing more than a junction
of drains. Off to take a look:

But it's not the same manhole. There are two covers, and they're
marked “PMG”, an
old, worn-out word for Telstra, so
presumably this one covers phone lines, possibly even fibre.

From there, on back to Richmond. On the way, it occurred to me that there's a sizeable
Chinese community in Box Hill,
and that the station area might have a good Chinese grocery. Found my way there with no
trouble, even a parking place across the road—until a man called out
of his car and told me that parking was not allowed there—and that after I paid $2 for a
parking ticket. Checked and discovered that I was allowed to park until 16:00, about 25
minutes, after which it because a no-stopping zone for the rush hour traffic. And that was
the time that the ticket machine had given me, being too polite to tell me that I had tried
to pay beyond that time, but taking my money anyway.

Rush through the Chinese grocery (which, in fact, looks quite good) and got the most
pressing items, but missed on the dofu.
Back out again and left at 15:59. heading south.

I was supposed to go north to return to White Horse Road (about 300 m behind where I had
parked), but it was almost impossible to get there. A combination of broken GPS navigation,
restrictive traffic signs, slow traffic lights and heavy traffic meant that by 16:15 I had
got about 800 m from where I had been parked.

Then my phone rang: Yvonne. But when I tried to answer it,
the connection was dropped. Called back, she answered, but couldn't hear me until I
shouted. Then, of course, she was upset.

Why was the connection dropped? That has happened before. It's this appalling Android GUI. To answer,
you don't just press, you “swipe” (not stealing, but wiping) to the right. But careful! Go
too far and you hit the “hang up” area, and I think that's what I did. And why couldn't the
nurse contact me? I had given them the number on checkin, but there was no evidence of any
call in the logs. It wasn't until I had picked her up that I discovered that, despite the
anal registration form they required, they had got all details, including old details, from
the referring doctor, and they had tried to call me on the number that expired some years
back.

Off to Richmond again, only 12 km away, and got there in only 30 minutes. Searching for
Yvonne was fun, but we made it out by 17:15. The best news of the day: the cyst was
not neoplastic. Then off back home.

How I hate Melbourne traffic! Again the GPS navigator, Melbourne traffic flow and road
works confused us. The obvious way would have been via the freeway, but it seems that
there's no entry to the west from Punt Road, and it tried to take me down Domain Road, which
was surprisingly empty. At the other end I found out why: the entrance to St Kilda Road had
been closed. Back again, fuming, and to Toorak Road, where I was only allowed to turn left
(east). Found a place for a U turn, into St Kilda Road and Kingsway, and finally got across
the West Gate Bridge at 18:00.
45 minutes for 12 km!

One of the worse purchases I have made online was our car fridge, which constantly annoys us
by stopping and displaying the message “Er 1”. In the course of time I have come to the
conclusion that it is overly sensitive to supply voltage, and I've played with the input
voltage switch to no avail. Today I did so again, and gradually it dawned on me: while the
car is running, there's no problem. But if I stop and leave the power on, the
voltage is insufficient, and it fails. The real issue is that it doesn't recover when the
power comes back to its expectations.

There's a simple solution there: after any such stop, unplug the fridge (the plug is
conveniently near the safety belt buckle) and reconnect it. That seems to work so far.

A surprising amount of stuff happened yesterday, and I took a number of experimental photos.
Today I spent just about the whole day documenting it, including playing around with the
various photos I had taken. As advertised, Photomatix PRO can assemble HDR images from
hand-held sequences, and in fact did very well. DxO PhotoLab did less
well in creating remapped perspective corrected rectilinear images from fisheye lenses, such
as this one:

Photomatix also came up with some irritating peculiarities. It's a Microsoft space program,
of course, so it comes with these annoying pop-up windows where a straightforward text input
would have been easier. And one of them persistently came up positioned across the bottom
of the screen, so I had to move it up Every Time to get to the buttons at the bottom.
This particular one seems so strange that I suspect that it's related to my screen size.
More investigation needed.

Most of them are curry tree suckers, but the one at top left is a
self-sown Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis. I've been meaning to transplant the Hibiscus for some time, but Peter
Jeremy told me I shouldn't transplant the curry trees until they were 25 cm high.

Problem: they have stopped growing upwards, though they're growing outwards. And doubtless
the roots are spreading too. So today was the day to try a couple of them.

We have eaten a fair amount of dried pasta lately, and I'm amazed how inaccurate the cooking
instructions are. The worst is clearly carelessness: rice sticks that require 10 minutes
cooking are sold with instructions “cover in hot water and leave to soak for a minute or
two”. But increasingly western-style pasta seems to want to be cooked for only ⅔ the time I
need.

Today we ate “fresh” tortellini, ostensibly “ready in 5 minutes”. After 5 minutes cooking
they were still only half cooked, and in the end we gave them 9 minutes, just about enough
to not be crunchy.

This happens so often that I wonder if the problem isn't with me or my equipment. But I
really don't like soggy pasta, and I can't see anything obviously wrong with my equipment.
My best guess is that “ready in 5 minutes” sells better than “ready in 15 minutes”.

I've commented frequently in the past that the Australian National Broadband Network is not the most reliable.
But it seems that I ain't seen nothing yet. Over the last couple of weeks I have received
the following mail:

We have received the following advice from nbn:

----
This notification is to let you know that we will be performing Fixed Wireless network capacity work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 30 hrs 0 mins during the change window

----
This notification is to let you know that we will be performing Fixed Wireless network capacity work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 24 hrs 0 mins during the change window

If your customers would like to know why this planned work is taking place, please advise them that the activity is being performed to optimise the serviceability and performance of the Fixed Wireless network.

Serviceabilty? In the 25 days (600 hours) between 14 March and 7 April they intend to
suspend service for a total of 81 hours? That's an availability of only
86.5%! And it's all in the daytime and early evening. Taking my usual access time frame
9:00 to 18:00, it represents an availability of only 76%. And on 14 and 15 March, and again
on 6 and 7 April, I'll effectively be off the net for two whole days! How can
they justify that?

I sincerely hope that it's just stupidity on the part of the people who wrote the document,
and that there will only be one outage. An alternative reading would be:

There are three sets of work to be done, probably on three different towers. Any one
user would only be affected by the work done on his tower.

The second three dates replace the first three dates.

“Back up date” is a poor and confusing way of writing “backup date” (in other words, an
alternative date if something goes wrong). “Back up” time is clearly stated as 20:00 on
the same day (using the second set of dates). Since the backup dates overlap with the
next outage, that would also support my suspicion that there's only one outage per
location.

And how long will the outage last? Until it's done, of course. But I can't imagine the
techies wanting to work 10 hour days either. Maybe that's a "just in case" time. Even 10
hours would be unacceptable.

I work for EAG , which is one of Hertz digital agency partners. I???m working on cleaning up links to www.hertz.com, and I need your help in removing some links from your site. While we appreciate the support, at this time we are requesting that you please remove this links as we strive to better control our backlink profile.nk profile better.
Here's the page on your site with the link: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2002.php

The link needs to be actually removed, rather than just disavowed. Even if they are ???nofollow,??? I???d still like them removed.

Once you???ve removed the link, please send me a quick note so I can create a record of it.

Assuming that they do, why do they want me to remove the link? Normally companies enjoy being linked, especially as (exceptionally) in
this case the link was to the home page, and there was nothing derogatory in the
reference.

What right do they have to require this of me?

What's a backlink profile.nk?

Why didn't they want me to remove the other three links in my diary?

By contrast, it's hardly worth mentioning that the text contains characters that don't
belong to the specified character set, and the message ID refers to an internal system.

The various things that I did on Tuesday still kept me busy today, and I still don't have all the photographic stuff
worked out. My big question was whether I should buy Photomatix PRO. It still has its
irritations—what Microsoft space software doesn't?—but I think it'll be worth the investment
this time.

The E-M1 (Mark I) and the E-PM1 use Olympus' old-style USB 2.1 cable, while the E-M1 Mark II
uses a USB 3.0 type C cable. Could it be related to the connection? On a whim, changed the
cable to a different USB hub. Bingo! The problem no longer occurs (after only one or two
attempts). The old hub is an el-cheapo USB 2.1 hub, while the new one is USB 3.0. The
cable is still USB 2.1, but maybe the designers of the old hub weren't expecting to have to
handle sustained traffic.

Will it work? We'll see. But at this point it's worth considering that if it does, Trump's
place in history will be greatly improved. It probably won't stop him from ruining his
country, but it would greatly improve his standing.

And why is Kim doing this? Some suspect that he's just buying time, others claim that the
sanctions are finally working. But isn't there another possibility? I had heard that their
underground testing facilities are gradually feeling the impact of the explosions, and that
it may not be possible to use the current facilities any more. So they have the alternative
of starting a new facility from scratch. That would certainly be an incentive to find a way
to shut the programme down.

Yvonne is gradually recovering from her accident—nearly 8 weeks ago—but she's still not
riding. Today there were more rider games
at Kryal Castle, and she was asked
to take photos. Since she still can't drive, I had to take her, the first time I've been
there. And of course I had to take some photos:

Those two images are taken from an identical viewpoint. The only difference was my hand in
front of the sun in the left-hand one. But Hugin didn't find any control
points? Why not? It should have been no trouble at all.

The images are of different size. Why? On investigation, the size differed by only one
pixel. Cropping the images to the same size worked around the problem. But why should this
be an issue? In the case of the Kryal
Castle panorama, I used images of vastly different field of view (some taken at 12 mm
focal length, others at 38 mm), and that worked fine. What's the problem what breaks this
particular view?

Margaret Swan brought us some spices as a present last time she was here: “Zanzibar Fish
Spice” from the Spice Bazaar. On
the web site it's called Zanzibar Fish Masala, which at least gives some indication of the
intended kind of cuisine.

But what do we do with it? It looks like a fairly typical combination of coriander, a
little cuminseed and cinnamon, and claims to have lemon grass in it. But on Tuesday we bought a book on North African cookery by Arto Der Haroutunian, and
this weekend Margaret was here again, so we had intended to cook a fish tagine. So that seemed to fit together.

The strange thing was how few fish tagines there are. Out of something like 30 different
tagine recipies, only two were for fish, and they were pretty similar, down to the vague
quantities (“6 halibut steaks, 3 potatoes, 2 medium onions...). So I made that, adding
some of my own ideas:

It didn't taste bad, but I understand why there are so few fish tagines. Meat, preferably a
lesser cut, really does taste better. Even Margaret agreed that we should cook a meat
tagine next time, and she would just eat the vegetables.

One of the things I'm very careful about is not to share passwords across various Internet
services. In particular, I never log in using a Facebook or Google password, and I use
different IDs (including email addresses and password) for each service. So I was rather
interested to read this
article, which pointed me to https://haveibeenpwned.com/. OK,
let's check. Yes, indeed, I have had my password stolen!

Really? Tried again with my standard fake email, groggyhimself@lemis.com, the one
I only use in examples in this diary. Bingo! It too has been exploited:

Checked with a completely unknown address, and that hadn't been pwned. So what have the
pwns been smoking? My guess is that they have just checked to see if the name crops up
elsewhere on the web. I know that it does (and that's why it exists): I continually get
messages like:

Isn't that simple? 12/1, 25/5, 50/20, 100/40, in each case Mb/s down and up. But no, those
are old, worn-out specifications. No silly confusing numbers any more, only “Plans”: Basic,
Standard, Standard Plus and Premium. And their speeds are very different. At peak the
downlink speeds are 7, 15, 30 and 60 Mb/s. That's round 60% of the old values.

That's not what the NBN promised. Is this just an indication that you shouldn't sign up
with MyNetFone, or is the industry diluting its promise? After discovering that I'll be off
the net for days at a time in the following 3 weeks, I wonder.

One of my most irritating experiences with eBay recently was in regard to
seller klearview_au, otherwise known as Craig Weber, who took my money, opened a
non-payment case, causing me to pay again, and never delivered the item. Both eBay and the
police saw no reason to intervene: too much trouble.

I'm not the only one. Although it seems difficult to find, two others have found my diary
entries and contacted me. I sent a message to the police, and got no reply. How many
people do we need to get something done? And how do they find out about the rest of us?

I noticed your website sends users to Privoxy here on this page - http://lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2008.php. I wanted to warn you that they're sending their visitors to a couple of shady sites, like a binary options review website which promotes known investment scams (take a look at the bottom of each page).

I'm sure you don't want your visitors getting scammed - if you're looking for an alternative, may I suggest our list of free VPNs as an alternative?

In case you???re unaware, a VPN is another type of proxy that achieves the same end result as Privoxy. VPNs sacrifice a small amount of speed compared to other types of proxies but are more secure, so I think your visitors will find this valuable nevertheless.

Clearly she had noticed nothing of the sort. The reference was completely indirect, and equally clearly not replaceable by another URL. But still,
free VPNs are interesting, so I followed the
link and was redirected to https://www.comparitech.com/, which,
though it didn't describe free VPNs, does seem to have some interesting links.

And yes, hidden in there is the Kniphofia, which hasn't flowered. Behind it there are also
a couple of Hedychium
gardnerianum, normally borderline invasive that seem to have had difficulty with the
soil or moisture conditions.

I gave up growing tomatoes in the past because they were a lot of work, and the results all
came at once. But this one Just Growed, and produced very nice, uniform fruit somewhere in
size between a cherry tomato and a “normal” tomato:

I've been fighting multimedia software and data for over 13 years, and somehow it's not getting much
easier. Now I can get material online, and I've been able to turn off my TV broadcast
reception, but the software and the suppliers still cause problems.

The big plus I found some months back is that nearly all German public broadcast TV
programmes are available online, notably at the ARD Mediathek and the ZDF. I'm
still hoping to find something similar in English.

But how do I find the content? There's MediathekView, but for some reason it limits itself to a maximum age of 30 days, and
even then it doesn't find everything. Lately I've been looking through the ARD and ZDF
sites, and found a number of additional programmes that should have been found by
MediathekView. OK, I can download them with youtube-dl.

But they arrive without the promised subtitles. Oh, you want subtitles? Why didn't you say
so?

But mplayer still doesn't want to know
the subtitles. At first I thought that it was the .de in the file name, but no.
What it prefers are .sub subtitles. How do I get them? Google, of course, and come
up with (the obvious) ttml2srt:

Done! Yes, but what a mess mplayer makes of the subtitles. They include the German
characters äöüß, of course, and for that I have to pass it the -utf8 flag.

But it still doesn't work correctly! Some of the subtitles are mutilated, notably around
the special characters. Checking shows that the subtitle file is in
an ISO 8859 (“Latin 1”) character set.
And for that I need -subcp latin1, not -utf8. That seems to be a doing
of ttml2srt.ph: the original is in UTF-8.

In the previous article I glossed over how to find online TV content. That's not always
simple. We had watched the first episode of „Die Kirche bleibt im Dorf“, and decided to
download further episodes. OK, off to the ARD
Mediathek, which has a search function:

Sorted by relevance, the top hit is “Kundin bleibt “Kunde”” (“Customer (feminine) remains
customer (masculine)”, a legal decision about German grammar). What earthly connection does
that have? A couple of false positives could be acceptable, but nothing this far off the
mark, especially since the thing I was looking up didn't show up at all.

This tries to emulate a mobile phone by requiring several “swipes” to the right, each
going back to the server for completion. But you can also select „Alles zeigen“ (show
all), which shows you about a third of the available programmes, not including „Die
Kirche bleibt im Dorf“:

There's a page with about one-seventh of the programmes, starting most recently.
There's a link to the home page, but that's just a reformatted version of what you see.
I'm looking for the second episode out of 30 (or 75, as the page claims). OK, I'm
getting the hang of this. Select page 7.

Wrong! At the end there are a lot of short supporting videos. What I want is page 4.
Click on the programme (being careful not to get the ones flagged (AD), which means
„Audiodeskription“, a version for hearing impaired people), and you get:

That's all. Oops. The bloody player has started playing, usually after I have
iconified it and have to find it again to stop it.

That not always the case. Other pages offer a download link, but they'll still start
playing when you least expect it.

Now surely people can do better than that. Why can't they provide a search function that
works, a list of programmes that doesn't spend minutes downloading useless images, a
download function that doesn't try to play the programme at the same time...

Desktop computers are for septuagenarians! Why is that? Unable to change with the times?

No, I think that the real answer is that I don't have to change with the times. I've
been using mobile phones since 1990, long before most people I know: in fact, I was known at
Tandem as “that guy with the
cellphone”. But I had a good reason then: I was moving around a bit, and people had
difficulty contacting me. Now that I'm retired, I don't need that any more, and the
disadvantages of mobile phones outweigh the advantages. And so it is with computers. Give
me a real keyboard! Nothing else comes close as an input device, despite all the attempts
to advance the state of voice recognition. I doubt that it will in my lifetime.

That links to another page with planned obsolescence: it refers to “February”, without a year. It
explains the three key areas that they find important:

Progress We’re rolling it out, with more than 6.3 million premises able to
connect today. And we’re coming to your street soon, with a further 100,000 homes and
businesses being added every month on average.

Co-operation Our work with phone and internet providers has helped reduce average
bandwidth congestion across our network from more than 4 hours per week to just 12
minutes, supporting higher speeds during busy periods.

Quality When installing equipment to prepare your homes and businesses for
connection we get it right the first time nearly nine times out of ten.

The first and third items are clearly of little interest to existing customers, but it's
nice to see that they're addressing congestion. And indeed, I've noticed improvements as
well:

On the other hand, there's a way to go before they're really helpful. This whole confusion
with the maintenance work is a good example of where they need to improve. And their own
figures show that one out of 9 installations fails and needs to be repeated.

My uncle Max, the brother of my father, will turn 90 years old in a few months. But unlike
his older sister, he's not in the best of shape. He has recently been in hospital
with amyloidosis, and he managed to
break a couple of bones in his back while doing some exercises on a machine. I haven't had
much contact with the family since Frieda's 90th birthday party, but I finally got round to giving him a call. I was
expecting the worst, but he still sounds pretty chirpy. I really should have visited them
last week

I've been using Gmail for spam filtering for
over 2½ years: first I
receive the mail via one of my 450-odd email addresses, then send it on to Gmail for spam
filtering. On the whole it works relatively well, though the filter is definitely a bit on
the aggressive side: there are many more false positives than false negatives.

But in the last couple of days things have changed significantly. Today I ended up with 174
messages in my spam folder. Of these 28 were genuine spam, 115 were FreeBSD commit messages, and there were
31 others.

Why? Ask gmail:

Why is this message in Spam? It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters. Learn more

That sounds like “we analyzed it from all sorts of angles, and the sum suggests that it is
spam”. In other words, not much help.

A number of people on IRC suggested that it might be because
of SPF mismatches:

I know of this problem, and I consider it one of the most serious issues with SPF:
forwarding messages like this is perfectly legitimate, but it breaks SPF.

Still, this hasn't been an issue for the last 2½ years. Is this really the reason? There's
an obvious solution, since I have control at the FreeBSD end: forward these messages
directly to my gmail account. Did that. Now to see if it makes a difference.

No NBN outage yesterday, as expected, and
when I came into the office, the network was still up, confirming my theory that nothing
would happen this month.

That was a little premature, unfortunately. At 7:38 we went off the net, and it didn't come
back until 15:10, almost exactly 7½ hours. On the way into town, and also on the way back,
I drove past the radiation tower to see
what they were doing, but there was nothing obvious.

After the net came back, there was no obvious improvement. In fact, there was quite a bit
of congestion for several hours, after which things came back to normal.

The outage affected all users for the same time period. That was to be expected, but
it's good to have confirmation.

I was wrong in my hope that this week's outages were overtaken by later ones.

Claims of “only 4 hours outage” were wishful thinking.

With the exception of Aussie
Broadband and possibly another ISP (unspecified, thus could be Aussie), no RSP saw
fit to warn their customers. Explicitly Iprimus, Optus and Telstra did not do so.

There's no reason to assume that this is over.

An indication of left hand, right hand syndrome is that one person had an appointment with
an NBN tech to find out what was wrong with her installation. He was not happy when he got
there and discovered no signal.

After that, off to look at some things that Yvonne had found online: a table and an
“Ottoman”, the latter
enormous. And of course, as ever in such cases, she wanted both of them. The table came
from two doors down from where Kelly Daly's parents live at the end of Virginia Court.

On the way, stopped off at Woolworths to
complete our shopping. I had already been to Woolworths in town, and had spent nearly $10
on most of the things on my list. This time we left with a bill for $140 odd. No wonder
our bank account is looking better since I started doing the shopping.

Part of shopping involved getting some cash from
an ATM. Since
ANZ closed their ATM
in Sebastopola month ago, that
has become a problem. Since I was in town, I went to Bridge Mall, noting quite a queue in front of me.
Summary: wait time 2 minutes, transaction time (including everything) about a minute.

On down Bridge Mall, noting the lack of people and the number of premises for lease:

That's the one that broke off
during planting. The other stem grew along the ground, and is now covered by a
happier-looking Tropaeolum. I can
only see where it was by the flower that is showing through:

What is it? I planted some Italian seeds a while back in the hope that they might be some
kind of French-style salad, but I didn't think they would look like that. Yvonne doesn't recognize them either.

The Strelitzia nicolai seems
also to be happier with the additional water, and new leaves are coming:

So, I think the reason for the 30 days rule is, that the content is only available for
that time due to legal restrictions.

That's a reasonable assumption, but it's not the case. There's lots of older stuff there,
like the example I discussed
yesterday, which is 3 months old and has a specified expiry date of 31 December 2018.

On the other hand, Carsten pointed me at https://www.mediathekdirekt.de/, which shows older content—but not the content I was discussing yesterday. Somehow all
of these sites have their limitations.

After 24 hours of routing my FreeBSD mail to
Gmail, it seems that Peter Jeremy's assumption is
correct: Gmail is rejecting mail specifically because it has been forwarded
from mail.lemis.com, and thus fails
the SPF test. Other mail
continued to be filtered. That, combined with Gmail's clumsy mail selection method (click
on the tiny box next to Every Message), makes it impractical.

That's a pity, especially since there seems to be no way to tell Gmail's spam checker to
ignore that kind of problem, or, better, to accept it if it comes
from mail.lemis.com. So for the time being at any rate, it's goodbye Gmail.

Yvonne off
to Ballarat today, and on the way back
she brought me a parcel from the post office—one of the advantages of living in the country
is that the post office
(in Napoleons) is open 7 days
a week.

It contained an Olympus STF-8 (a name clearly chosen by a non-English speaker) macro flash unit that I had bought from
Kev Russell, and which I hadn't expected for another couple of days. This time Australia Post managed to deliver it in less than 72
hours.

It's an amazing piece of equipment. Just getting at it took a bit of time. It comes in an
oval case with several subdivisions:

Mounting it on the camera isn't easy, either. It comes with exactly 2 rings that screw into
the filter of exactly three designated lenses: the M.Zuiko 12-40 mm
f/2.8 Pro, the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm
f/2.8 Macro and the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro. I no longer have the first, but I have the other two.
But why this limitation? Effectively there are two rings with filter threads 62 mm (for the
12-40) and 46 mm (for the other two. The unit isn't cheap: Olympus sell it for $699. My
el-cheapo ring flash came with more rings than I could count, about 6 (though irritatingly
not a 46 mm one). Why does Olympus limit things here?

But they have an even lower guide number than either of the others, only 6.5! Yes, you
don't need much power for macros, and I took this into account when I bought it, but this is
really borderline. I can understand the weak flash rating of the toy flashes, because they
take their power from the camera battery, but this thing is powered by four AA cells, the
same as for the high-powered mecablitz 58 AF-2 with a guide number of 58, which is over 50 times as powerful.
They could at least have put in the same GN 9 tube that they use in the FL-LM3.

Yes, it shows the way round, but not as clearly as I would like. The good news is that the
lid is formed in such a way that if you put the batteries in the wrong way round, they won't
make contact.

Mounting the flashes on the ring is fiddly. It took me about 5 minutes, though I'm sure
that it will be faster once I get used to it. The clamps come apart, and the heads have a
⅜" thread for a tripod:

But all these cables! And they're not detachable, probably because of contact issues. It
certainly looks like the most complicated flash I have ever had. And in spite of all the
complexity and the cost (also the most expensive flash I have ever had), it's missing
something obvious: a flash test button! Why did they leave that out? How do I measure the
lighting with an exposure meter?

Yesterday we had noted strong northerly winds, not a good sign. Round here strong northerly
winds almost invariably change to westerly winds. If there is a bushfire, the northerly
wind drives it in a line to the south. Then the westerly wind takes the line and converts
it to an area extending to the east.

Today I listened to the news at 7:00. Yes, indeed, there were bushfires in
Western Victoria,
fortunately some distance away. And once again they mentioned names of tiny little places
that say nothing to most
people: Naringal
East, Taroon,
Ayrford,
Dixie, Ecklin South, Naringal,
Garvoc,
Laang,
Nullawarre
North, Panmure,
Terang... They're so small that at the
time of writing Wikipedia only knows four of
them.

Wait a minute. Garvoc rings a bell. That's where Nele Koemle lives! Spent some time
pondering this matter when I heard a helicopter fly overhead. That could only be from
the CFA. No getting back
to sleep any more. Out to look at the Emergency Services Map. No fires in our area, but further west it didn't look good:

Later Yvonne got in contact with Nele (via Facebook, of course). She had taken her children with her
to Warrnambool, about 35 km away,
leaving her husband Pat behind to protect property, horses and dairy farm. She had heard
that the paddock by the churchyard was burning. She had had some horses there, and people
had seen horses running loose. And she had lost telephone contact with Pat. What a
situation!

Later things became clearer. No humans or animals injured, no damage to their property.
But the dairy farm of Pat's brother had been affected, some sheds destroyed, also their hay
supply. And—we think (the Emergency services are now too polite to present this
information)—the fire still hadn't been contained. Later the maps were updated to show the
extent of the fires, clearly showing the shape caused by the wind change:

Nele and Pat live outside that area, just north of the junction with Mcconnell's Road, to
the south-west of the western fire. In fact, it's not clear why they still refer to it as
the Garvoc-Laang Road fire, since it only barely touches the Garvoc-Laang Road. But things
still aren't over. Hopefully no further damage will occur.

The other thing that puzzles me: why there? The summer was neither particularly hot nor
particularly dry, and when we were there this time last year things had looked
pretty lush:

The bad news about bushfires continues to come in, not only from
Western Victoria, but also
from New South Wales,
coincidentally not far from where Chris Bahlo used to live,
near Bega. Round here we
only had the effects of the wind. This was
a Canna a couple of days ago:

The first was a Basil plant I bought at
ALDIon Thursday, and the second is
the Thyme plant that Mick threw out along
with the bathwater on Friday. But I had expected the thyme to be tougher. We'll see how it develops.

Chris Bahlo borrowed the SD Card
from my Olympus OM-D E-M1
Mark I on Saturday: she had the impression that her camera was very slow. I had
noticed in the past that even the slower Olympus cameras can benefit from faster
cards—Yvonne's E-PM2 was a case in point, so
I suggested she try a faster one.

But I needed the thing back, so over to pick it up today, in the process discussing the
problem with Chris. Whatever it was, it was an order of magnitude worse than just “a bit
slow”. After fighting my way through the menu (this is an E-M10 Mark II, and there
aren't as many buttons), managed to get it to take reliable 6½ photos a second, still a
little less than the claimed 8½, probably because of the slow shutter speed. But after
taking about 20 photos it took forever to write to the card, whereas it was done in a few
seconds with my card.

So: faster card? Went looking yet again, and once again I was amazed by how expensive the
fast cards are. Today the best price I could find was round $75. There's a question as to
whether that's really needed, but that's for Chris to answer. The real issue is that her
original speed problems were an order of magnitude worse than what we saw today.